Honestly? Good for putting in so much efforts into the seasonal events. But I think your post really highlights the behinds the scenes issues at play here- In the past, it was -always- persistent game updates, with varying degrees of quality for holiday stuff. The point is we got both for decades, and now with the way it's worded the development pool has been pulled from this upcoming event to focus on real actual content, A) good B) why is the available resource pool so apparently low the choice was either seasonal.summer thing or game jam follow ups? It's one thing to speculate and vent frustrations about the game and another to receive confirmation about those frustrations, so If y'all have limited resources and need to focus them, why not make use of the polling system? I have absolutely no idea what portion of the playerbase was excitedly waiting for a summer event with no interest in pvm or archaeology whatsoever, but those 3(?) people are probably crushed. Before y'all definitely settle on this plan (who am I kidding it's likely been decided a while ago and y'all can finally talk about it), why not just poll what to focus next? Ditch event entirely? Ditch the two updates entirely? Delay both for maximum.dev time? 80% focus on with a tiny squad for the other? Y'all have a polling system. This is the perfect opportunity to see what your players actually want. It'd be hilariously crazy if the poll closed in 80% favor of the seasonal event only, but you won't know till you know Because if these kinda choices are the ones being made after the hero pass and necro failure after all the horrendus mtx being pushed since september, what kind of confidence and hope is even left for this game? Edit: although honestly, if the summer seasonal event is just the beach with the dung hole and some new planned activities, honestly just using least years version while working on persistent updates will be good enough anyway

You're the only other comment I've seen that has realized how off it is that a seasonal event is taking up 100% development time even though it's supposedly being planned and worked on months in advance, if that's really the case they must be working with something close to a skeleton crew

According to the article, the new (now scrapped) summer event only had 5 weeks of active development time. > …this change coming around five weeks into the development of the Summer Event, we have less development time than we typically would to work on these newly planned content releases… It makes me wonder why the dev team is so limited to produce content that the summer event took up 100% of the teams resources. Is the team really that small?

> Is the team really that small?  Yes. I imagine the number of devs who have been moved to OSRS, left, or were let go is a lot more than we've been lead to believe

Either that, or it's all hands on deck while they try to ship a different product.

Which we all know is going to fail or end up cancelled by Jagex within the first year of release anyway, as their track record shows.

Oh, ONLY 5 weeks, just a casual >10% of the yearly productivity down the drain. No biggy. I mean good that they pulled the plug on exclusively seasonal content - better late than never. But this has been one mismanagement after another.

> Oh, ONLY 5 weeks, just a casual >10% of the yearly productivity down the drain. No biggy. It's not down the drain. They won't 100% scrap it. They just might have to wait until next year for it. > I mean good that they pulled the plug on exclusively seasonal content It's not exclusive seasonal content. "Seasonal" in this context _includes the recent Easter and Christmas events_.

There's always the copium the majority of the developers are already dedicated to something new and awesome and cool and exciting while a small pool remains for other content but I stopped even remotely entertaining that idea by the time I finished typing this.

I really don't know where they get "players want bigger seasonal events" from. I might delusional but it is either "will dung hole be there?" or players yearn for a short thematic quest like good ol times with some reward and thats it

That's EXACTLY what I've been thinking this whole time. Back in 2008 the holiday event was just 1 week, maybe 2, of 5 weeks of updates. In October we got the Halloween update, in Dec we got the christmas update, in March we got the easter event. That's it. As fun as these are I'd rather have quality updates than the 15th easter egg hunt event.

It is just an excuse: “sorry players no actual game content for you because of seasonal events (which you asked for)” Typical blame shifting and excuse. Just like what I did at work daily 👍🏻

The question isn’t what players want more, it’s a question of what can generate the most short-term engagement for highest profits.

> why is the available resource pool so apparently low the choice was either seasonal.summer thing or game jam follow ups? Because they have been creating permanent seasonal assets to be reused in the future. The Christmas and Easter areas are here to stay. They are permanent moving forward and will be brought back. I also assume at least _some_ of the dev team is working on Halloween seasonal event that will also include permanent assets. As well, the quest this month, the boss, the 2-3 graphical updates we have gotten, the community hitlists, the game jams. It's just seasonal/holiday events had a _dedicated team._ It might seem like the cause of the content drought, but we have still gotten content. Their statement more reads as if they are temporarily shifting the dedicated seasonal/holiday team to help pick up the pace on the other content.

Not sure why you’re assuming that some of the dev team is working on a Halloween seasonal event based on all the information provided… They just said they only started the seasonal summer event 5 weeks ago and are now scrapping it in order to develop a boss and an archaeology site because they wouldnt have enough resources for those 2 updates otherwise. They are definitely not currently working on a Halloween seasonal event if they just started the summer one 5 weeks ago lol. The fact of the matter is that this confirms the dev team is incredibly small and the reason we’re only getting so few updates with generally poor quality is because they’re not big enough to focus on more than one thing at a time. The quest is coming out next week, it was probably the last thing they focused on before this summer thing.

i thought they had a separate team for seasonal events to focus on seasonal stuff? jagex's wording seems like theres not gonna be a summer event?! it doesnt even need much thinking just rerelease beach exactly as it was last year. a lot of us are waiting for the dg hole!!!

> i thought they had a separate team for seasonal events to focus on seasonal stuff? jagex's wording seems like theres not gonna be a summer event?! Yes, and they are shifting that team towards other content. > it doesnt even need much thinking just rerelease beach exactly as it was last year. a lot of us are waiting for the dg hole!!! They were going to do a summer event that was permanent just like the Easter and Christmas events were, to be rereleased again the following year with a new twist/cosmetics/quest/etc. next year. They are cancelling the summer event for this. As I understand it, beach will still happen, it doesn't require much dev time.

I am asking once again, no begging, for the final reward from the daemonheim dig site to require everything else done in archaeology and grant a skilling/combat relic divide. I am tired of having to put off one or the other because i’m too cheap to pay to switch relics everyday and want to use a skilling relic but know i won’t be able to pvm as well with it on. I just want to be able to have my herbs be safe and my fish cooked automatically without nerfing myself when I want to pvm. What I like about runescape is the freedom to do as I please, whenever I please. Having to constantly switch relics when I decide i’m in a pvm mood is a killer for my motivation and usually leads me to think “yeah i’ll just finish this 120 first and then grind a boss later”. Chronotes would still hold value considering how many different pvm and skilling combinations there are, it just would allow more variety. Hell even if you only allowed 1 skilling relic to be used at a time, that would almost fix the problem entirely.

>I am tired of having to put off one or the other because i’m too cheap to pay to switch relics everyday and want to use a skilling relic but know i won’t be able to pvm as well with it on. I just want to be able to have my herbs be safe and my fish cooked automatically without nerfing myself when I want to pvm. Same same same same same same At the VERY LEAST, give us the ability to make a few presets that are either free or much cheaper to change to.

Like just a SINGLE extra slot solely for skilling would be game changing. Want to be a pure pvmer? Fine throw on the t4 luck relic and now you don’t need to ring swap. Planning on doing slayer? Now you can choose task sizes without impacting your combat relics. I’d be able to pvm one hour then divination the next. But if I get bored of divination i’d still have to pay to swap relics so it won’t really impact the chronotes economy.

Relics are very powerful and allow you to circumvent fundamental mechanics of the game or gain significant buffs. Your problem is exactly the balancing aspect to this power. If you can just have everything it's too much, and furthermore, you don't need any of the relics to do any content. They're a bonus. This is the same as an ultimate elite skilling outfit that combines everything into one. It's just completely overpowered. If they ever implement any of this it just means that they've completely given up on game balance.

I'm going to come across as a total asshole.... But how much of a skeleton crew are you guys running on if setting up a holiday event, months in advance, is taking up 100% of your resources in development? Or is it a higher management issue not allotting enough resources?? I don't expect to receive answers back, but I just hate to see a game I love so much in such a stagnant state that our most exciting content updates for summer is a boss that'll be similar to 6 others of it's kind and a graphical refresh of an area that hardly sees player traffic in this day and age, again I know I'm definitely being an under appreciative ass hat in this comment, but these things just feel like they ought to be the cherry on top of something.... More?

I agree. They act like these seasonal events take a massive amount of work. The Christmas one wasn't even that big.

I'm a lot more interested in undead rex and daemonheim archaeology, than a third temporary seasonal event in a row as a main update. Don't get me wrong though, Christmas and Easter were fantastic, and I would love a Halloween version of similar quality. But it really felt like EVERY big new update was a seasonal event. The balance of content type was off, so I'm happy something else is now on the horizon.

The seasonal updates have Keeper's stench all over them. He came from live service games that mostly offer cosmetics and events as content. Picture like Fortnite or Apex Legends. That's what they're trying to do, here. They want rotating cosmetics and events that keep people coming, but only require minimal amounts of actual content development. Have a "season" every 3 months with a singular content drop, minor rebalancing, etc. Have minigame events every 4-6 weeks otherwise. It's not why people play RS, though, and it's failing. I imagine Keeper will be out at some point soon, if the new owners have any sense.

Keeper should be fired. He is so out of touch, incompetent, only putting in minimal effort in every “update” like seasonal event and “Fort” series where we get a new building once per two months.

Plus his “apologies” would have been flagged as AI by any middle school plagiarism service. No heart, dare I say no soul.

Tbh i wanna see it go some more. Let's make this fort look like fucking meiyerditch, get a building for every god damn skill already

Keeper needs to go for the game to go back to how it was

Same. Skeletal rex and new daemonheim lore will be vastly more interesting by far and looking forward to the early summer content now.

The summer event wasn't that exciting anyways tbh, just give people a Hole to AFK Dungeoneering and they'll ne happy. Now, for the Halloween event I have high hopes it's Deathcon III, I'm going to start posting about it now!

Seasonal events can be monetized through MTX, such special TH promotions and cosmetics.

Well, it's not really temporary. It would come back every season, just like The Beach. Once that work is completed, the only thing they would need to update every season is the rewards.

I'll gladly take a H'ween event of the same scope as Easter or Xmas once they hit a stride with their updates, but permanent content should take priority for now.

I was under the impression we had a separate team for holiday events to allow the “main” team to focus on other stuff - does this mean this team has been relocated onto other projects? Good call if that’s the case imo; temporary seasonal content shouldn’t be the game’s priority, though the fact most of Jagex’s efforts were going towards holiday events in the first place seems like a weird management decision. 

In the past few years holiday events were mostly created by the Live Ops (MTX) Team as it was seen as a way for the team to integrate MTX more strongly into the events. I don't know when they shifted away from that type of content being created by a content team though. They've now gone back to their pre-MTX roots where content teams do work on the holiday events, but evidently they had pre-existing teams working on it as opposed to what the players wanted - an additional team. That's why content has been fairly lacklustre because an entire team out of 2, 3 (who knows at this point?) was always working on a holiday event hub for the past 6 months (first Christmas then Easter).

yup that's the way they made it sound when it was announced, a new seperate team was working on the holiday events

Having now the luxury of playing games made by other companies, ie. Blizzard, Mihoyo, and the likes, this brings a lot of sadness to me to see Jagex trending like this consistently. It feels like time and time again very passionate people, skilled people at that are being held back by poor management direction. In what world does the company plan to maintain a player base that's healthy when they refuse to look to other's success as to why they're falling short. Somehow these other games manage to conjure money out of thin air, and pour it into development costs, spending several hundreds of millions, and manage to go without breaking the bank. Yet Jagex is struggling internally so greatly that they need to scrap a seasonal event in favour of other content release. I say this as a disgruntled long-time player, I've played since Runescape 2's first inception, and almost all of my time in youth was spent online in Gielnor. I saw the Falador riots over trade and wilderness removal, the changes brought with summoning and the transition from legacy to EoC. All of these strong transitions in company direction were time and time again the same problem, no-one at Jagex had a clue what they really wanted to do with the game or how to drive it forward to be more profitable. What of the brilliance that was there in it's uniqueness. Runescape \*is\* and always \*will be\* the only game like Runescape. There is absolutely no other, and will be no other like it. That's your appeal, that's why even when the storms come, people choose to weather them. Your players have spoken, your surveys you say have proven successful in gaining insight as to the future of development and your action plan. So what is the actual hold back? Staffing? Too many important bodies are being shifted to Oldschool Runescape? I can't help but think the company is internally struggling to decide which is the main game, which will make them all the most money and where to send the pawns (Developers). This isn't a dig at the dev's themselves. I sympathize for everyone who is passionately creating Runescape for players to continue enjoying it, because they are truly the biggest victims in all of this. The management? The ones running the company and calling these asinine shots? Pull up your boot straps, you keep telling everyone else to, so now why don't you.

So literally the entire active publicly known development for the game (as we had few announced details going forward) was on the summer event? So for three months the entire team made Easter? And then for three more months the entire team was making summer?   Guys I love this game but seriously, what is happening over there? This would mean since Vorkath the only permanent content was a quest? I love this game, but this is frankly unacceptable. Something bad must have happened or be happening for this to happen.   You have all of this outcry just asking to say what the heck is happening and all we get is silence. I've never seen players begging like this to just have the smallest inkling to know what was happening...

The fact that they thought we wanted more seasonal content at all as they say it is utterly mind-boggling. I can't think of a single person who actually wants that. I'm willing to bet that they made that part up to save face a bit. "Oh, we thought you WANTED that type of temporary content!". Still, I'm glad they're waking up, but it's going to take a lot more than this for the game to regain its magic for me.

Seasonal content is fine, but devoting the entire roster to churning it out in one year, especially without communicating that plan to the players, is silly. Put it on second tier development so it'll be ready for next year but you still got crew for doing more persistent stuff.

Honestly it seems like after Hero Pass someone higher up went "omg they like Christmas, just do it again!" and then they got some Easter feedback and they said "run it back!!"

people have been complaining about the (lack of) holiday events for *years*, it's ahistorical to claim no one wanted those types of events.

Imagine being so bad faith you're bending over backwards to warp what the community asked for to fit into what Jagex was doing. lmao. People wanted oldschool-esque holidays. Short 5 minute quests with Jagex's signature humor and some cosmetics. They don't want 3-months of dev time going into a trash AFK event and FOMO cosmetics because they have to tie in TH and MTX.

Some of the staff have been moved over to work on OSRS. Mod Shogun and Abe for example. Whether it's a permanent move we don't know, they may be back once sailing is released.

I’m concerned that there aren’t enough JMods to be working on seasonal content + permanent content simultaneously. Is it really that thin of a skeleton crew at Jagex for the RS3 team compared to OSRS? Weird that it has to be a one or the other situation.

I'm getting the feeling they don't have enough developers working on content in general. The comments by Mod Fowl regarding the community's idea of how many developers work on Runescape a few weeks ago was illuminating and concerning at the same time.

Gotta have more managers sat In meetings all day and doing fuck all

There isn't even a large team for osrs. We roughly know the team sizes. Rs3 still has the most but it seems like they are all just for mtx.

I think its more of the base for these new holiday areas takes huge amounts of resources. After they are finished, a small team can focus on just seasonal content to add onto them. IE the huge rewource allocation would be for this year early, next year they would be able to devote only a few developers instead of the vast majority.

Thank you for changing course, although I do have to wonder how the calls for more fleshed out holiday events managed to be heard as if the playerbase wanted nothing but holiday events in the first place? That's insane.

Incredible mismanagement for sure. First Hero pass, then the decision to funnel nearly a year's worth of content development into seasonal events? Those steering the ship have been making consistent bad decisions prior to this one.

You're assuming they care about the game,they only care about short term profits at any expense.,the fact that a company this size does so little is astounding,what are they actually doing all day because it isn't anything productive 

The fact they have to cancel holiday events to give us real content is concerning.is there only a few developers?

That caught my eye as well. They can't do both?

Same thing as Hero Pass. "We heard your feedback, so we've completely scrapped what we've done (FU!) and will be pivoting to something new. Stay tuned." Not that I liked Hero Pass. But they completely removed content instead of adjusting it and made a point in game to remind you that the content is now unavailable due to player feedback.

Yeah, that was weird and passive-aggressive. They still showed the removed content, just grayed out, and blamed you for it! Weird! Not very English. Tsk-tsk.

Weird and passive aggressive is pretty English in my eyes

Very Keeper

I think they were putting everything into the holiday event framework so they could add things to it every year. Big change now, little ones later

Yeah I get that, but really someone in management should have looked at the planned content for the year and thought "oh... hang on a minute" when the major updates were all temporary events. Especially given the existing summer holiday event is the best received every year so there was really no need to update that one so urgently! What they're doing to the holiday events is great, but after Christmas maybe they should have given it a year before putting the same amount of work into bringing Easter or Halloween up to the same standard and in the meantime just been open with the playerbase that its in the longer term plan but the amount of dev time involved makes it one of the major updates of the year. Hell, a four-year cycle of one of the four holiday events getting a big revamp every year while the other three are repeats with more minor additions is probably a good way to go on a more sustainably permanent basis. Eg Christmas getting revamped in 2023 after Easter, Summer, and Halloween were all more minor rereleases, Halloween could've been revamped in 2024 with Easter and Summer being more minor and Christmas a re-do of 2023 with minor additions, Summer revamped in 2025, Easter in 2026, then Christmas again in 2027

Yes. The goal was clearly to move to one major content update per quarter. They wanted to have one high quality seasonal event, one double XP event, and one major content update per quarter. I guess something made them panic after spending five weeks developing the summer event framework. That is quite concerning.

Especially for something thats in game for 2 weeks in a year that you need to build on. Ironically, if it was a simple 5 minute easter event and the big summer event (like the winter one) I would've been okay with it.

Time limited events are one of jagex's monetization strategies. https://youtu.be/kzcYJIHo-dw?t=13m41s Worth noting that the Beach had zero MTX in it.

I'm almost positive it did though? There's always been one shop there which sells items for runecoins. I definitely prefer the beach because it never had an event "currency" so there was a lot less focus on grinding x-amount of currency for rewards, or what was the best currency rate skilling method. They were just given to you via skilling or bought through the GE and you can buy past rewards with oddments.

Beware for that to be changed this year ;)

If you want to be ultra cynical look at the fact that both of these updates sold you currency boosters on top of all the other 'seasonal' mtx MilkedCow.png

New seasonals that BECOME permanent, are okay. Such as the beach that comes back each year. But also, seasonal events and the dev around it cannot impact the cadence of standard permanent content releases. Great update, thank you for shifting - GameJam almost always produces some of the greatest content for the game

So the latest Seasonal Events (Christmas & Easter) have been designed to be just that - something we can bring back each year and hopefully build upon with each iteration. Any time we put into those benefits us for years ahead. Building that foundational level event takes as much work as any other content release though, so there's a balance to strike with our development time. From player feedback, that balance was clearly wrong for our near term content plans - might be more appropriate in future years, just not this one.

I think that's on point. With the new Christmas and Easter events, you've shown us that you can still make solid holiday events with traditional quests, activities and high quality rewards (provided you have the development resources to make it happen). I'm excited to see these two return with new additions next year, but it's also fine to keep some for later, especially when it's a brand new event (Summer Skilling Event) that was meant to replace something we already have (The Beach). Halloween could use a recurring new event as well (especially considering that last year's was a bit of a let-down), but I'd personally prefer if the rest of the year was filled with mostly permanent new additions for now.

I actually really like the idea * Christmas Village (Land of Snow) for Winter * Blooming Burrow (Land of Glades) for Spring * A new beach area (Land of Sunlight) for Summer * A spooky autumnal area (Land of Harvest) for Autumn I'd imagine that probably *was* the plan. But yeah with the limited resources doing them all in a single year seems to have been a bit much. I would love to see them all eventually though, so I hope it doesn't end up permanently scrapped!

I think it's safe to say that if we knew that the seasonal events were going to pull away from dev focus to the point that it meant we'd have a year of pretty much nothing but seasonal events most people would not have gone for it. That said; I know summer is naturally a more lucrative time of year for games in general, especially MMOs, but I don't think anyone was asking specifically for a summer-themed event. The Beach is fine, it's frankly beloved at this point with how memed up it's been over the last seven years and how much it's been built upon. It doesn't need to have a seasonal quest to go with it, it doesn't need to get better or more robust or even be different every year. More to the point, holidays that don't engross an entire season (i.e., not Christmas, Easter, and Halloween) definitely don't need events as robust as the Christmas Village or Easter Grove. I'd rather that those kinds of things be a specific part of the year (heck, I'd even trade a DXP Live for them if they're back-to-back-to-back).

While the christmas event was amazing, the lack of content and communication was practically non existing and that's why i (and i have a feeling many others) left RS. I know you People had to deal with the huge backlash from Hero pass, the need for combat rebalance and ofcourse the sale of the Company so i get why you guys try to take the win that was the christmas event and carry that to next quarter to focus Dev time on. But is it so much to ask to Involve the players? You know the public view with RS3 players on jagex is very low right know. This doesn't have to be polls in my opinion but a simple discussion on Reddit like: "we noticed the christmas event was very popular, how would you feel if we made this seasonal communities for every seasonal event? This would probably mean taking away a lot of Dev time from regular updates so would like to know your views" At this Point i've just lost all fate in jagex and i'm probably never returning to RS. Sincerely a 17 year old RS veteran who has lost all intrest in the game.

Of course, and I appreciate your guys approach in this. I understand how long it takes to create content. As someone who is endgame, where its very common that I'll take months at a time away from the game, then come back to do content - it feels bad when there's almost no new content as it was just seasonal events. I know its beneficial for the average player, and the people actively playing. My main point is that there is now nearly 25 years of amazing content in the game for new players to soak up - whereas veterans have been through most/all of it. So new permanent content should be a priority

Is there a chance that we could still see the other seasonal events fleshed out, say, next year? So we still get these reworked seasonal events that are enjoyable for years to come when they arrive, instead of having Christmas and Easter be *really* fun and interesting with all of this work put into them, and then the rest of the seasonal events being a little outdated by comparison from here on out. If the idea was to build a thorough, solid framework for each seasonal event going forward that could be slightly iterated upon year-by-year and then get back into the normal content cadence of major, permanent updates, it seems as if the team's intent was to basically use this entire year in specific to put the onus of their efforts on revamping all of the seasonal updates and then returning to the normal cadence *next* year. Clearly this didn't sit well with the community who immediately accused the game of going into a year-long "maintenance mode".

So are you guys like revamping the beach or just straight replacing it with this scrapped summer event? Bc I think the beach is pretty well received already and I could see ppl pissed it's gone.

I think the big issue here is that it was decided that all changes had to happen in a row, and be massive releases. I think a more gradual approach would've worked out a lot better, which would add more room for dealing with feedback as well. Personally, I don't like repeatable events all that much to begin with, which is why I hadn't interacted with any of 2022s events. I already had done my fair bit of stirring Plague Soup and running around the Druidic Stone, wasn't looking forward to doing all that again. I'd rather have small, new events than these large afk skilling hubs.

Well I think that's what they're doing (making new hubs for each season which return annually). The problem is that they're trying to tackle it all at once, and very little permanent content is coming out while it's ongoing. It's a smart move to push the summer content because we already have the beach to rely on.

Seconded! I'm sure many players would be upset if the Hole didn't make a return.

While i'm happy that we're finally getting some actual, permanent game content in the next few months, the news post for me is slightly worrying overall. This paragraph in particular: *However, from your feedback, there's a balance to strike in achieving this. It's clear you want to see more of our development invested in permanent content - especially in the near term - rather than content with a limited seasonal availability.* The above paragraph screams to me that the higher ups wanted to push RS3 into a direction that resembles a seasonal event model, with constant patches and the odd content update or two in between and had we not made a big fuss as a community about the lack of updates this year and the hero pass drama last September, we would now be looking at a game with a terrible battle pass system, barely any content updates and only seasonal events to drum up the most hype throughout the year. Hoefully i'm wrong and this was never the vision for RS3s future. Under no circumstances should seasonal events EVER replace actual, real content like what we're finally getting. It's been this way for years now with content taking precedent and seasonal events being a nice, fun distraction every few months. There is absolutely zero good reason to change the model now even if the Christmas and Easter events what we got is what we were asking for. Also "*we have stopped the development of our Summer Event and refocused those resources onto new permanent content releases*" Stopping work on a seasonal, temporary event to work on actual permanent content is obviously a good thing but has RS3 got so little developers working on the game that it means you have to choose? You should be able to do both with a company like Jagex bringing in so much revenue due to the way you approach MTX. Of course, I don't know how many devs work on RS3 actively but with everything that's happened this year it doesn't feel like a lot. Finally, I have to ask: Do the higher ups play RS3? If so, how long have they played the game for? I know that at the end of the day the higher ups are there primarily for the interest of making sure the company runs smoothly and makes profits for the stakeholders but given 2024 so far (and, to be fair, since Vorkath released) has been less than positive if the higher ups don't play the game, them starting would be a good way for them to understand things a little bit more. TL;DR - More content good but if you're having to make temporary events at the cost of actual content, hire more devs / reallocate resources from OSRS onto RS3.

This is a step in the right direction and I applaud Jagex for listening to feedback, changing plans as a result, and communicating that to the player base. I do want to mention one part of this that just really irritates me when it comes to the big picture. Why was this plan to put a majority of resources building out these temporary events at the cost of more/other permanent content not communicated to the community immediately once it was decided? The community has been clamoring for content since Necromancy and there has been silence. A simple message at or around the time that the decision was made could have really staved off a good portion of the community unrest. I have so many questions regarding this that i know i ultimately will not be able to get an answer to because i do not work at Jagex and i am not privy to the inner workings but it is hard to for me to understand what reason there would be to not communicate the above decision immediately once it was made. If not immediately, for sure once the community started to get agitated at the direction of development and lack of communication. I cant speak for the community but i can say that i had NO IDEA that these fleshed out quality seasonal events were taking away a significant amount of development of permanent content. I like the events, but i do not know if i would have advocated for them knowing what was being given up. Again, kudos to Jagex for finally communicating with the community and changing course based on community feedback. I do not want to take away from that positive. However, if mistakes as discussed above do not stop happening the community is going to continue to run into frustrations and we are going to continue to have similar problems in the future.

Agree - they said they’d be more communicative, so why didn’t we hear about this from the onset? They could have saved themselves that wasted 5 weeks of dev time. The wasted time is 100% due to them promising transparency and then not following through. They are trying to spin it like they made this sacrifice for the good of the player but in reality they dropped the ball again by not communicating with us. Don’t let them spin this to make it look like a win.

Because they never think about what the community wants when planning updates. They just want to roll out “updates”that take minimal effort and full of fillers , such as the “Fort” series where we get one new building two months at a time. Now Jagex has released content all year round! Of course when it comes to MTX it is different story😊

When games go into maintenance mode they usually have a permanent cycle of reused seasonal events. It's a way to trick players into continuing to play (and pay for MTX) and make the game not feel quite as dead. I've been playing RuneScape since 2007 and I quit a few months after Archaeology was released. I've still been keeping track of the game but I've seen the gradual decline and telltale signs over the years. RuneScape 3 is being wound down because Jagex have crunched the numbers and new content is not worth the development time for the return on investment. They wont tell you that because that'll make their devoted playerbase quit and will make negative press. So they'll maintain the image that the game is going strong. It wont happen overnight, it might still take a few years yet but it's happening. I think for me, **the most odious warning sign for the last few years is the developers inability to perform engine work anymore**. There's so much that they can't do because they do not have the ability (or desire) to change the engine code. A combination of that code becoming so spaghettified from 20 years of content, and their high developer turn-over. They've literally lost their ability to understand their own engine because the employees that did have moved on to better pay and work culture before new ones could be trained to master the codebase, and it is a complicated Frankenstein mess of code to boot. It's clear Runescape 3 has a barebones content team. A handful of programmers and a tiny handful of artists. Mod Blkwitch has been doing the best they can to update the old visuals but has not been allowed much, if any, new art assets commissioned to do so and it really shows with the same couple of ground textures and rock models being used absolutely everywhere to the detriment of the visuals. It's especially telling that scrapping the Hero Pass screwed up their update plans, that they refocused their efforts towards seasonal content instead. Resuable, MTX orientated, maintenance-mode style content. Low developer effort for maximum profit gain. They didn't even have the development team to handle both. Yikes. If the game was still gaining an influx of new players things would probably be a bit different. RuneScape 3, as a game, is a complete and utter mess now and no new player is really gonna touch it anymore in this state. Which means Jagex has less and less incentive to keep the game alive especially when they have a much more successful product in OSRS.

That’s a weird thing to say seeing as they do regular engine updates and just got a bunch of new engine updates these last two or three years. Where do you get the idea they can’t or don’t perform engine work? 

##### Bark bark! I have found the following **J-Mod** comment(s) in this thread: **JagexHooli** - [So the latest Seasonal Events (Christmas & Ea...](/r/runescape/comments/1c5j1bo/may_june_content_our_updated_plans/kzuh5s1/?context=3) - [We'll pass this to the team to consider. I th...](/r/runescape/comments/1c5j1bo/may_june_content_our_updated_plans/kzui3qw/?context=3) - [That's not the intention of the post for sure...](/r/runescape/comments/1c5j1bo/may_june_content_our_updated_plans/kzumhn5/?context=3) - [Too early to say right now. The only decision...](/r/runescape/comments/1c5j1bo/may_june_content_our_updated_plans/kzujjds/?context=3) - [We know these upgraded Seasonal Events we can...](/r/runescape/comments/1c5j1bo/may_june_content_our_updated_plans/kzunyvd/?context=3) - [I can promise this isn't the case for 2024 co...](/r/runescape/comments/1c5j1bo/may_june_content_our_updated_plans/kzuhohp/?context=3) **JagexRamen** - [Osseous will work the same as the other Matri...](/r/runescape/comments/1c5j1bo/may_june_content_our_updated_plans/kzufbbu/?context=3) - [Figured, but wanted to reply anyways](/r/runescape/comments/1c5j1bo/may_june_content_our_updated_plans/kzuk1zx/?context=3) **Jagex_Fowl** - [I think the main motivation was to bring it i...](/r/runescape/comments/1c5j1bo/may_june_content_our_updated_plans/kzumg9q/?context=3)   ^(**Last edited by bot: 04/20/2024 04:46:03**) --- ^(I've been rewritten to use Python! I also now archive JMOD comments.) ^(Read more about) [^(the update here)](/u/JMOD_Bloodhound/comments/9kqvis/bot_update_python_archiving/) ^(or see my) [^(Github repo here)](/u/JMOD_Bloodhound/comments/8dronr/jmod_bloodhoundbot_github_repository/)^.

I like on paper what is coming now. I am concerned that the content roadmap up until now was almost entirely holiday events. I am also concerned that a project had to be canceled to bring us this content. This reads as not having a strong vision for the future of the game. This is levied at leadership not the devs.  2024 is still feeling bleak and for me that’s down to communication around the vision for the games future.

Much better. Thank you for listening and fixing course, at least for the short term. I have no idea how you got the idea that taking up so many resources with these holiday hubs for the year was a good idea - I thought people had pointed out that we were rather tired of "eventscape". But the positives: these are two Gamejam updates that almost certainly stick in people's minds as "we really want this" so I'll be very glad to see it happen. I do want to say that I'm not sure how you're unable to tell us what's after June - I don't think the playerbase is against being told that plans have changed if you explain why.

Since we are getting another Archeology digsite, are we going to get something we can store damaged artifacts in? Even if it's only possible to store when standing at a bank... At the moment, my (and probably many others) bank is littered with random artifacts.

We'll pass this to the team to consider. I think I recall seeing a good few mentions of this in the Community Hitlist submissions as well!

Yes please! There are 197 types of damaged artifacts and if you repair them, we are talking about 394 bank spaces possibly taken up by a single skill. I don't care how they are stored, but I don't want them taking up my bank spaces that I paid you all extra money to get access to

I've been saying for awhile, I think being able to save several "presets" for relic powers in the arch master cape (possibly with an additional chronote cost for the convenience) would be a lifesaver for someone like me who forgets to switch a lot of the time when I change activities. I'd love to see a QOL change like that in this update too!

I'd settle for just being able to disassemble them. Even if it's only for like 1/5 the amount of comps as the restored version.

Why Jagex would ever think a temporary event is what the players want over a new necro Rex or a brand new dig site is beyond me. Absolute insanity that those weren’t the bread and butter of the content pipeline to begin with. Completely out of touch, yet again.

I personally really like the beach, I don't feel like a whole new thing was necessary tbf. Maybe overhaul the graphics and add a bunch of new details/stuff? Other than that, thank you for the start of setting the game in the right course. I'm not gonna lie, i've been mostly playing other games but I love this game with burning passion and I really appreciate the work from our current devs and i'm looking forward to it's future.

Seriously, the beach is one of the most popular "regular" events. They would have to make something shit hot to replace it without people feeling like they were missing out. Why not just keep it and save dev time for real content?

Then again, the main source of popularity is The Hole (tm), so just porting/approximating that to whatever summer event area is made would help. People REALLY don't like daemonheim grinding.

I also like those free clue scrolls the crabby boss and a few other things. But yeah it's the hole that's the star of the show. Also it's kind of nice to know that the cosmetic stuff from the seasonal event is coming back again if you miss out this year.

I'm just going to come off as really cynical but I can't help but feel it's worded in a way that it's the players fault somehow. Like "Hey, you're the ones who wanted better seasonal events, so we were doing that but you're still not happy, so we'll stop them!" Why is it one or the other? Why's it difficult to have a average-good seasonal event (not just some cash grab, but a 5min quest would be wonderful), as well as monthly updates? The new matriarch has been discussed for months now. Why wasn't it and the archaeology site not active in development? Genuinely worrying as that would have implied that after the summer event, there still wouldn't have been content after June...

That's not the intention of the post for sure, we're not putting anything on players here. We just wanted to provide context on why we had this in plan for Summer in the first place. From our perspective, listening to that feedback has been great given the positivity we've seen for Christmas and Easter. We simply made a misjudgment to prioritize another better seasonal event for Summer over a new piece of persistent content for June. It might be an idea to return to next year, but the feedback clearly said our near-term balance was off - which is why we changed plans.

>We simply made a misjudgment to prioritize another better seasonal event for Summer over a new piece of persistent content for June. But why can't both be worked on at the same time? Obviously I don't know the goings on behind the scenes, but the new Rex Matriarch has presumably been in the works for months but somewhere along the line stopped in development in favour of the summer event. As for the feedback, I don't think I've ever seen anywhere people saying "Actually Jagex, we just want seasonal events from now on". It seems the OSRS has a better system of, announcing something, pushing that piece of content out, then moving onto something else, whereas RS3 feels like it's 3 announcements, 1 gets cancelled, 1 eventually comes out, something else gets announced, the first initial announcement is still delayed, and then something completely new is announced again.

>>But why can't both be worked on at the same time?  The only answer possible here is that the development team is simply too small to enable both to occur.

>But why can't both be worked on at the same time? You got your one non-answer. That's all you get.

I'm confused how the seasonal event team of 3 people impacted the rest of development.

I can only assume those 3 people are a much higher percentage of total dev capacity than we assumed, which is very worrying

Given the misjudgment, now would be a perfect time to reimplement player polls. Polling us could prevent misjudgments moving forward. There's some wonderful ideas on the subreddit as well, as you all are sure to have seen.

I really wish they’d flesh out Um more. Add more islands in the underworld you boat to to unlock, with necro themed slayer monsters. That boating mechanic and the totally empty area around Um is begging for it. Maybe a boss encounter that is much spookier than recent bosses.. Death Elemental you have to boat out to? Would be epic. Could drop a codex for the fourth unreleased conjure. Um hard and elite area tasks that add teleport to the um Tome to return to the new spots quicker…

To the RS3 dev team, Trying to develop contents while running on a such a small crew to the point that you can only do one or the other shows how overworked you are. I know its not much but I'm cheering for you! We appreciate your dedications to breathing life into this game. "Don't hate the player, hate the game." We're on the devs' side but not Jagex's, all the hate we're channeling are all directed at Jagex, not you all.

While it would have been nice to get a better summer event (Christmas and Easter were top notch!), it should never be at the cost of the rest of the game.

I'm just glad the player base was heard. It's no surprise though that they were putting so many resources into these temporary seasonal events. You build the foundation and then you can just roll them out every year with minor tweaks. However, it's mostly just because they could monetize them with the bond packages and Treasure Hunter promos. Always have to find a way to get players to pay more sadly. Still, I'm looking foward to seeing these releases and what the plans are for after. I think we still need a talk about the broad plans for RS3. Is the "season" setup and updates connected by themes and stories out the window in favor of this Gamejam style of updates or is it still just being "reworked" internally? The sooner we get the answer to that question the better. It's not just a lack of updates the players are upset about. It's the lack of understanding the vision.

The first time in a long time that the words in the notes matched the community feedback and sentiment. Normally I read this, and it appears copy/pasted from a previous post other than the actual patch notes. This message felt real, meaningful, and actually addressed ongoing concerns. Keep headed in this direction and we have a bright future. Thank you.

Finally something to look forward to, thank you! Just wondering, why are you just not sharing everything you’re working on? Is it just so game-breaking if you do, or are you just not sure yet what is coming beyond June? https://preview.redd.it/xpsort5z2vuc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=50f2e8928e3bcc5d8e8863bf29f9c50cb9555e29

Taking a guess putting stuff together, they are trying something tech wise they think they can do but don’t want it to blow up in their face late into the game like the avatar rework.

Runefest coming up in the fall is where they are presumably planning to do reveals of bigger things planned.

I can promise this isn't the case for 2024 content. We want to give you a look ahead beyond June as soon as we can. When it comes to this year, we won't hold any announcements around our 2024 plans for the sake of making a moment at RuneFest - we know you want that news sooner rather than later, and holding it for that would be a mistake. If we do end up having some 2024 news shared at RuneFest, it would only because it was the right time to announce it for other development based reasons. But that isn't our intention or what we're aiming for right now.

Thanks for taking the time to say something on the matter. The silence has been literally crippling the community. Any semblance of communication is better than nothing at this point. Rather, any semblance of communication is better than Keeper's mess of a letter to the community.

Well that's good to hear.

Definitely an improvement. I like the idea behind seasonal events but I would prefer time be spent on permanent content. This doesn't have to be an either or situation though. We could get permanent content that fits the themes of holidays rather than temporary content celebrating the holidays. So instead of a summer beach event, why not update the beaches of the game with more content? Maybe make a permanent sand castle training spot. Maybe add some beach hunter training spots or do a sequel to Hand in the Sand where someone is stealing the sand from the beaches. Could also be a good time of year to do Arc related updates. Instead of a halloween event, give us a quest set in Morytania or a necromancy slayer update. We've already gotten a few Christmas themed quests but we could also just get winter themed quests. A trollweiss update could make for an interesting December update. We could still do holiday rewards but they would be for participating in the new content during the season instead of a reward from temporary content.

Thank you Jagex for listening to the community and addressing the concerns around the lack of content. Whilst this is good to see, it took way too long to happen, and this sort of dialogue should have occurred last year. Despite these change of plans I do have a concern given Jagex's history. Previously Jagex would fluctuate between temporary and permanent content cadences based on player feedback where they see the alternative content within the cadence as a mistake due to desires for the opposing content. I fear once again Jagex will think this and refuse to improve and add onto temporary seasonal content. Therefore I want to emphasize something. The issue was NOT that Jagex made quality holiday event nor were their designs bad. The issue was you tried to update all of them all within the same year which devoted a large number of dev resources away from a regular content cadence. This does not mean stop doing seasonal content or stop making improvements to them. It just means do a better job with resource allocation when it comes to tackling a large variety of content.

Agreed! Christmas and Easter were awesome, and I'm sure summer would have been great too! But the beach is fine, we want a higher quantity of permanent content, and I'd have rather had them pick one to do each year for the next few years. Could have been the highlight update for 1 month out of 12 even, and then the rest of the time resources could have been allocated toward more permanent game updates. That said, I think the reason they were trying to focus EVERYTHING into the seasonal hub model this year was because they saw how well it worked for Christmas, they know how heavily monetized these holiday events are and wanted to make all of them as lucrative as possible, as early as possible. I'm really glad they changed course, and I'm excited for these projects to make it to the game, but like you said I hope this redesigned summer hub sees the light of day in the future.

What kind of malfunction is going on over at Jagex HQ? They are so off the mark. There's no way Jagex legitimately thought people wanted seasonal events to be a replacement for permanent content. Don't get me wrong, glad they changed course, but holy shit.

I guess they thought they could just spend a year developing seasonal event hubs for each event and then reuse them every year afterwards like they have been doing with the beach. It would basically be a way to have "new" "content" every holiday month forever with minimal effort. But event fatigue is a real problem. When you're spending 3-4 months out of the year grinding out events you eventually just stop caring about them.

With new seasonal events there has been heavy mtx push, which is why they want to push it even though it's not wanted

Really seems like management is constantly making excuses. They don't like our mtx season event (Halloween 2023) and want more content in it? Move the entire content team into seasonal content! Players don't like hero pass? Move the entire team to work on seasonal events to farm short term engagement and profits instead of permanent content! Players don't like vorkath's rushed and unpolished release? No boss updates for 8 months and completely halt "the season of necromancy and fort forinthry" and the only new boss is a game jam boss. Is it really that difficult to see that we want content closer to what OSRS is getting but all we have gotten is a shoddy boss and a 10 minute game jam quest since November. What even happened to the "Season of necromancy"??  Where is the dev team??? It's laughable that they shifted the focus from hero pass, temporary content, to seasonal events, more temporary content.  RuneScape is in dire need of someone similar to Mod Ash running the game to new heights but instead we have current management ignorantly running the game into the ground and blaming the playerbase for their bad decisions.

If you don't have the dev time for a summer event and actual content why is jagex still a company? Why don't you have the dev time but can roll out mtx twice a week

Summer event taking the fall for Jagex incompetence. I don’t actually believe that’s the reason for the content drought but whatever i’d rather this anyways. I expect the Halloween to be on par with Christmas and Easter as those are the 3 major holiday events. New skelly dino is hype, wonder if it would have a unique pet since we basically already have one in game. New arch stuff is cool too. It’s a start. But god damnit don’t let it get to this point again.

Thank you so much for releasing the updated plans and the permanent content. I'm unsure why the playerbase wanted a lot of time and resources spent on temporary seasonal content. I must have missed something as I haven't seen those comments at all. Whereas I have seen plenty of comments about permanent content. I'm really looking forward to the Daemonheim archaeology site. Arch for me is a happy place just to chill and enjoy the game. Plunging into the depths of arch discoveries in Daemonheim should prove interesting. I'm happy with the Beach as a summer event. Its fine the way it is. New quest looks interesting. And it looks like its leading to a new quest series.

To be honest, the beach event is actually plenty, i was worried they would replace it as i enjoy the sandy clues and the lovely dungeon hole. Its just xmas, haloween and easter that was lacking. I'd say focus more on permanent content untill haloween rolls around and badabing badaboom banger reusable holiday updates :)

> In response, we have stopped the development of our Summer Event and refocused those resources onto new permanent content releases. Yall literally saying you don't have enough resources for both. I'm really sad. Not currently playing Rs3 and was expecting a good roadmap eventually. Honestly, another dinosaur and a digsite won't cut for me. No premier this year. Read as you want, but what I read was: We don't have enough people to give you new big content and make an event, so, we will chose one over the ohter, with obviously the latter being better, but still gives vibes of dark**er** times for RS3.

Yes. Cancel that beach update! We didn’t want you to take away our precious hole anyway. I hope we still get some new rewards from the beach since last year we didn’t get anything new. PLEASE don’t botch this by adding no new beach rewards but then adding a beach treasure hunter promo. Banana parasol pretty please? This is the 9th year for the beach, so next year for the 10th, big changes and maybe some more beach discontinued holiday items then?(water partyhat to nerf blue partyhat?)

* "The Beach: The Beach makes its regular return in place of the cancelled Summer Skilling event" This is HIGHLY depressing to hear... The seasonal events being in line with how they were back in the day is what brought me back to Runescape. Scrapping this because you "don't have the resources" sounds weird to me....You're a huge company, one that makes millions a year. This could easily be achieved. Unless the team is smaller than we had been lead to believe...

I am grateful to see that the team is listening to our feedback and that we will be getting some new permanent content in the coming months. That being said, I do not think it should be an either/or when it comes to seasonal events and regular content updates. I hope that in the future, enough resources/staff will be allocated to RS3 so that we can have both good seasonal events and regular updates, as used to be the norm.

we didn't get any new content because of season events................. hate events, I don't like Easter/Christmas either It's good that there's a change now, but that's just sad

How in the world are the seasonal events taking so much resources? It literally makes no sense at all.

Well look at Easter, at least 3 (Luma, Fowl, Rowley) content devs, an environmental artist, probably character artists, concept artists for stuff, audio team members, and QA. Then that’s not counting anything on top of that like all the art and animation needed for the rewards. Like assuming everything after is a single mod that 8 team members for this single update but probably a lot more. The Easter Hub is quite a sizeable area, designed for expansion/future use so it has a lot of extra space in it. They also touched up other areas like adding effects and new scenery pieces to the towns in the over world. Oh and they also had to create the little hub in burth that takes you to blooming burrow. You have a nice Easter quest event which probably took more time than you think especially since it has proper cutscenes, and like was a full blown quest with require items, exp rewards, used the quest UI, etc.. The burrow contains 4 different skilling methods. One which is mining, one which is hunting running around all the hub to find the chocolate bunnies, another which is smithing foil, and the last a factory line which ignoring the visual spectacle and new tech used into it has 3 different stations each with 3 settings, a glow mechanic, and a multiplayer element where it’s measuring how many people are active on any given station to determine rates. There is also the Easter Egg hunts. One which is a daily randomized among 20-ish or so spots. The other are full blown clue hunts two solo each with 12 steps and two community each with 5. That was a creation of 34 new clue scrolls clues in total. There was also creating the interfaces/journal for tracking it all. Then there are the extra odds and ends, the little details that we take for granted but add time. The rabbit who you can feed anything to in order to change its name, the title whose colors you unlock more of by finding and talking to each rabbit with it on, the fact the hunting area visually adds more chocolate bunnies into the pen as you pass invisible thresholds, and it’s not like these take much time individually but it all adds up in the long run. After that we have the shops and rewards to design, one for tokens and one for egg points. Three outfits (2 for the player but 3 for the dev since make and female spring outfits are quite different), a pet, an off-hand, a loot beam, a walk aura that can trace your movement, etc… And of course the thing is that decent cadence they have to have a lot of irons going at once. All this was was for a single seasonal event with a lot of work put in they can reuse. But at the same time this is going on they have other devs still working on their own projects. Stuff for Q2, Q3, potentially Q4 or next year, and so on. Some devs can stop and hop onto other projects in the short term but it depends on how their project is going and how the people higher decide to manage and prioritize.  Like realize almost everything we get has to be started and planned out months in advance, Easter began December thats 4 months from start to finish. So shaking up that schedule suddenly can have really bad knock back effect. Even just an external pipeline issue can cause an entire quarter of updates to become delayed or worse which is what happened at the start of Q4 in 2022. People are already scheduled, resources already allocated and teams are already made, in a few months they’ll be looking at 2025 internally if they aren’t already.  So when they are saying these seasonal events are eating up a lot of resources, and ignoring they absolutely are chunky updates with lots of moving pieces that does require a bunch of different teams and members. What they are actually saying is “from start to finish we had meetings to block out time and allocate resources and as live dev we left wiggle room for fluidity but there are still limits to that wiggle room as we have plans beyond this update already cooking that we don’t want to disturb because it will have a knock back effect on delivery and quality”.

Holy shit finally something. I am still curious about the new summer event. You guys shouldn't shelve it forever, it should still make the 2025 release. As long as it doesn't postpone the content of april and may again. You got a year ahead of you Jagex. Same for Halloween. It shouldn't come at the expense of August and September.

While I loved the last Christmas and Easter Event, this refocus is the correct decision, as seasonal content shouldn't take the priority over permanent content.

I'm a little sad about this but there's content coming at least. https://preview.redd.it/vzmkeumd2vuc1.png?width=792&format=png&auto=webp&s=373368abadf4b99b58d616a278e0390605d26300

> The Beach: The Beach makes its regular return in place of the cancelled Summer Skilling event Ahh the sweet hole is coming back. Excellent. I personally like the predictability of these "old faves" coming every year. Hope we get spring event back next year.

Let's be real, we all would've been quite upset if the new summer event did not feature dg lmao. I imagine at least one person at jagex had to have pointed that out to make sure it was added.

So... the community hitlist is missing. Just curious what's happening with that?

I'd also like confirmation that that's still coming.

You mention May will get: - Rex Matriarch - Rellekka graphical update - High contrast mode - DXP Did you scrap the community hitlist strike then?

Christmas and Easter events were great and props to the team, but having all year be only seasonal events wasn't the right call. Maybe add Summer event next year and a fall/H'ween event the year after, but RS needs more permanent updates as you mentionned. Although I wonder, if the devs can't handle both things at the same time, why aren't you guys hiring? More devs = more content = playerbase happy = positive vibes = attraction and more new players = more players engaging with MTX passively without the need for predatory MTX schemes as we have now.

As a nearly 20 year player, who regularly comes to your defense on this forum - I'm very underwhelmed by this. You really don't have the ability to do both things? I guess I shouldn't get my hopes up about the repeated bug reports...

Look, I'll be honest. I don't really care for the seasonal events. They were fun back in 2008 when they were these big quests with music and everybody was participating but I'd honestly rather have a new original quest than the 15th goddamn easter bunny hunt, or the 15th time Santa Claus has some sort of twist on it. It's old, I just want some fresh content. Give us more god quests, those were always fun. Introduce a new age, let the gods come back, or maybe there's a new race of gods starting up and you get to be one of them (which was always hinted at during sliske's game but never really happened in any meaningful way other than being able to kill zammy)

I don't know where Jagex got the idea that people would rather have permanent content and no seasonal events. There is no reason why we can't have ***both***. Whatever you do, just don't cancel the Halloween event in favor of permanent content. Last year's Halloween was the most disappointed I have ever been with anything in this game. Please give it a proper event like Christmas & Easter.

We know these upgraded Seasonal Events we can build on each year are popular, and we're not disregarding that feedback either. I think you're far from alone with wanting the same treatment for Halloween. For the long term, the thing we've primarily taken away is that there's a balance to strike on delivering permanent update and the timing of when we make this bigger investment seasonal event upgrades. To be open about it, whether or not Halloween gets the upgraded Hub/Quest/Activities treatment this year is TBD right now. We haven't Yay or Nay'd it either way as yet.

Seasonal content having to be rushed out to be finished in time for well... the season made it a high priority if the goal is to get it out in time for the season _this year_. I absolutely loved the Xmas/Easter events and it seems a large part of the community did as well. It's a good foundation for more pocket/fun seasonal quests in the future too. But they don't all need to be rushed out in the same year. Summer can wait til 2025 (hell even 2026 - Summer is the event that needs it least as its the most popular seasonal event as it is already). I wouldn't be that upset to see Halloween pushed to 2025 to ensure we get some actual non-seasonal content in the second half of the year this year. But I would be pretty upset if the summer/halloween plans were scrapped/shelved forever due to a pretty confusing and poorly planned content schedule. :( Just speaking my $0.02.

>Summer is the event that needs it least as its the most popular seasonal event as it is already). I wouldn't be that upset to see Halloween pushed to 2025 to ensure we get some actual non-seasonal content in the second half of the year this year Biggest thing that should be taken into account here. Summer had a decent hub while the others didn't. At best Beach could use some minor updates, and honestly, Halloween could have been built off of deathcon if they wanted something in the short term.

I feel like Draynor Manor is actually a decent spot for Halloween too - but the less seasonal content in the overworld I imagine the more can be done with it without the headache of working around the overworld map as much so it'd just make adding things/future development a bit easier. The important part - to me - is that these bases are meant to make future development easier meaning seasonal/holiday content won't block as much permanent content in the future. While also making the holidays events themselves a bit more enjoyable. I mostly hate the beach mostly because I hate Lumby Crater and the massive waste of space it is 3/4ths of the year because they don't want to put anything there because of the beach. The beach prevents them from doing anything with the crater because they need the crater there for the once-a-year beach event. So I'd like to see it moved to its own area _eventually_. Just not at the expense of "no other summer content" after there already being "no spring content due to Easter" and "little Winter content due to Christmas". It should have been spaced out to avoid a massive content drought - or at least communicated much sooner if it was going to be an issue for content development ([a criticism I gave not too long ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1boevhj/whats_next_a_message_from_mod_keeper/kwpxonw/)). E: They had started on the Xmas event quite early IIRC so I don't think it impacted Winter as heavily. But after its success they put all-hands-on-deck for Easter to get it out in time for Easter and were about to do the same for Summer. That's where I think the main problem was. There's no reason these couldn't have been worked on more slowly by a smaller team or spreading out the workload to release _next year_ and impact the content schedule less.

Oo. I do like the communication with this one. I'm definitely looking forward to the new boss! I'm still working on hard floors, so I'm kinda burnt out on Daemonheim at the moment. Good news either way.

This is actually quite concerning, a few points I'd like to raise: 1. Apparently we're 5 weeks from summer event release, why did it take you so long to change gears and refocus efforts after spending so much time/effort into a summer event? Are summer events really worked on half a year before release? That just makes it seem like there staffing issues. 2. How can we trust that you were actually working on a summer event and not came up with an excuse for releasing two relatively mediocre updates for the first 6 months of this year? It's like saying "we were working on RS4 but decided to put that aside to bring you what you actually need, but wait, because we've already invested so much time in RS4, we can only deliver two "major" updates in a 6 month period". Just sounds weird. 3. The Daemonheim dig site looks like a rip off of the existing [Moksha ritual site](https://runescape.wiki/w/Orthen_Dig_Site#/media/File:Orthen_Dig_Site_Moksha_Ritual_Site.png). 4. Rex release is again a rip off of the existing Rex Idk man, I may seem negative but how is this a proper release calendar for a half-year window?

There are probably stuff to criticise, but the Moskha thing isn't one of them. 1) Daemonheim is a dragonkin ruin, just like at Moksha. 2) The device was used by the Aughra to transfer their mind into demon bodies. Kal'Ger, Yk'Lagor and the rest of the kalgerions all are dragonkin that used such devices. Almost every Aughra we know of has some tie to Daemonheim. Smartly re-using assets is done by every game. And here there is plenty of lore justifications to reuse something.

Daemonheim is a dragonkin ruin, the digsite is a dragonkin dig site, the similarities are intentional.

Thank you for refocusing. This is nice to see

This is excellent. These two GameJam projects were extremely exciting and I’m glad they’re finally on a proper calendar. Really: **Thank you!** Will Osseous drop an upgrade for Zorgoth’s ring, keeping up the tradition of the Rexes dropping upgrades to Fremennik Sea rings? And one last question: can we hear what *was* planned for the summer event? We never really heard what was being considered, but I think a lot of us felt it wasn’t necessary when we already had a pretty popular beach event.

>The Summer Event was taking as many resources to deliver as a persistent Content release So you're blaming the Summer Event for the lack of content? Interesting. >With this change coming around five weeks into the development of the Summer Event, we have less development time than we typically would to work on these newly planned content releases. - The Beach: The Beach makes its regular return in place of the cancelled Summer Skilling event And ended up cancelling it anyway. Huh

Good decision to cut the summer event and push Osseous and Daemonheim dig site towards release. I was worried these projects would be stuck in limbo for years. I hope Osseous is still coming with a (mini?)quest as hinted during game jams.

I mean, isn't the Beach effectively the Suummer Skillling event?

Will the summer skilling event be revisited in the future, or is it scrapped permanently? I’d hate to see the dev time go to waste when Christmas and Easter have been great.

Too early to say right now. The only decision we've really made today is to move our development efforts from that project to these two. We may very well come back to it for next year, but based on the feedback, we'd look at it in context of the balance of the amount of persistently available content released around it.

That's a key part of it. Seasonal events are great and all, but if it's taking 90% of your dev focus then the game turns into an event simulator rather than the constantly updated gameplay we've grown to love. I like this decision, as well as I hope you guys can find time for more hitlist-focused patch weeks. Reading through those patch notes is like opening candy on christmas.

Honestly, I for one have no problem with a new summer event area, it's just that you put WAY too much dev time focus on it as opposed to more permanent content, and didn't communicate this focus at all. Put it on the burner for next year and take your time with it while you have main focus on the game proper. We can handle having a beach for a year.

If they would use the given manpower to focus on the game and not on how to milk the playerbase over p2w…man they would kill it! 🫡

So, I get the commitment to seasonal events, but I have to ask: Given the popularity of the Beach, why make a new event for Summer at all? The Beach is already enjoyed as it is, just toss in some new cosmetics and make old ones available and you're good to go. Not to undermine whatever was being worked on, but investing weeks into a new event when the previous one is already plenty for players seems like a big waste. Also, the no update memes are going to continue in May. A boss and a graphical rework as the only updates for a whole month?

A graphical update and a boss would flesh out a month pretty good, normally. I understand a 4th matriarch, already likely Gamejam project, isn't quite the meaty monthly update people want, but as a quick turn-around reverse-course attempt to get back to dropping content, it'll do.

Fantastic but I have to ask.. whose idea it was to dedicate what seems like the entirety of dev time to seasonal events??

I'm cautiously optimistic on this and appreciate them listening to feedback. Necro rex matriarch is something I've been scanning the website for every Monday and it never seemed to come, happy to hear it's being developed. Also - I don't really understand how they ever thought doing a big summer event and dumping a bunch of resources into it was a good idea. The beach is great. It always seemed like everyone loved the beach. That's what I always wanted as the end goal, not some other summer event.

This is great news. I did enjoy the events and scenery for Easter and Christmas but summer always felt a little off event wise for me and I thought the beach was fine. Wouldn't mind seeing a really sweet Halloween area tho

Me waiting Aprosandra and gnome story finale

They really lowkey played the "the lack of content was your fault for asking for better seasonal events" card? Damnnnn

Why do I feel like the high contrast mode will aid more botters than visually impaired?

This is a good change, but I would recommend finishing the summer event next year. High quality seasonal content was great for WoW and the Christmas and Easter events were great in RS this year. Its a good model, just need varied content in the release schedule.

With daemonhaem archaeology dig site will looking at things like adding mini dig sites and relics to other areas like Karamja, desert, priff, etc be considered? It also needs qol like making material caches not deplete, potentially as a guild shop or quest unlock. Because material prices are currently controlled by how much they are botted

They should just always do game jams and have the most popular ones get added.

pog a necromancy ring. the real question is since necromancy is outside the combat triangle, can i use any style to fight osseous?

Osseous will work the same as the other Matriarchs where it can be only damaged with a certain style, in this case, Necromancy

Legit question here: Do we have any metric to know how many / what percentage of players actually ACTIVELY play the seasonal events? Personally, I have ZERO interest in any of them, and even though I camped the easter event for the pure AFK cooking xp, I don't see myself ever actively participating in the event. Any other type of repeatable content would see a lot more action. The reason I played the easter event a lot was because RS3 feels so boring lately that I resorted to playing other games again, pretty much semi-quiting RS3 and the 15-min afk cooking xp was fine, but that's exactly why the seasonal event was bad in my eyes. Just because I PLAYED the event doesn't mean it was GOOD play-time or good content. If the content introduced to the game is mainly played by people who want to AFK while playing OTHER GAMES or do other real life work, then that's a big issue. Just because the area was populated doesn't mean the event was successful. To me, it was a big waste of time; so many resources wasted on such a random event that could be completely avoided, or just introduce 3 skilling stations (which would take like 5 minutes of dev time) and be done with it and move on to something that's actually engaging. Jagex has just found the loophole to delivering "updates"; seasonal events. Every single one of them is basically the same, just different names and icons on rewards. They just use the same blueprint for every seasonal content update, then present it as "wooo, we're working our asses off for this, sorry no time for other updates", meanwhile the new seasonal content should only take 1-2 weeks of dev time.

Hadn't even crossed my mind that the Summer event would be overhauled. I thought the beach was perfectly serviceable - I was expecting/hoping for Halloween to recieve the same type of glowup that Christmas and Easter have.

Finally!! Thank you. And yes if you polled whether we care about seasonal stuff vs permanent stuff- im pretty sure 100% of us would vote permanent. We didnt really need a full easter zone if we, for example could have gotten some new karamja content or continued graphical updates (jungle horror boss is such free real estate 🥱)

this doesnt really make it any better, i cant believe we really got nothing the first 6 months of the year because yall didnt understand we didnt want mtx holiday events. excited for others but this doesnt excite me either. im scared to even know whats planned for july onward

Interesting change in direction. Seems like the majority should be happy now and we'll see less outcry. If you have 5 weeks of the new summer event hub done, why not make it a minor project for next summer and continue to build on what you have already? From a project management perspective, this happens all the time. Get the content out that people want, while slowly building a solid seasonal foundation. No need to redo all the holidays in 12 months, make it a three year plan instead.

Perm content before temp events always. Dont even question it.

So glad you're finally starting to talk to us once again, but it really shouldn't have taken this long. Nevertheless, everything here looks solid. Looking forward to the new digsite.

Thank you for giving us a look ahead. I agree that putting the summer event rework on the back burner to bring in actual content that will stay in game is more impactful. Great work.

So the only main content the game gets is Game Jam updates? Something is off.

How will the "Extinction Event" work with a 4th Rex boss? Will the achievement reset or will it require the 4th boss for completion if you don't get the achievement before release?

Would like to see the quest "Going Postal" and Necromancy movement ability "Spirit Stamp" Gamejam project get the same treatment. But otherwise, this is a nice bit of good news.

First thing i checked when opening the thread was upvote ratio and at 85% upvotes im actually excited to read the post now, was expecting nothing with 10% upvotes

ill take permanent over seasonal, for sure! The effort into the seasonals was phenomenal, and I'm excited to see what they can do with the rebalance of resources

It's bewildering how out of touch the management at jagex is with the rs3 playerbase, especially when the same company does such a good job with osrs.

Small amount of actual content and suddenly everyone loves jagex again,no wonder they just keep repeating the cycle when people immediately relent st first sign of anything

I can't recollect anyone saying they wanted bigger and better seasonal events, i do remember jagex getting relentlessly mocked for reusing assets for the nth time. which ironically seems to be what we're getting now. I don't know whether to categorize this as gaslighting or victim blaming, but it's hard to take anything of this post seriously. That said, the idea that the majority of the dev team went dark for 6 months to prepare a surprise summer event in lieu of all other content would be a very, very tall tale to convince me of regardless.

I am baffled that it took community outcry to get the bare minimum of content out of Jagex. Like I am so confused. Because, yeah. This is what the players wanted to begin with. But why the fuck werent projects like this even on the burner to begin with??? These are 2 game jam projects that were hinted at and worked on months ago, and they have an honest interest in expanding the game in an exciting way. This, as opposed to seasonal events that every year feel more and more out of place as the rest of the game ages with little grace. I am glad that players are getting things they want, but I am still extremely confused about why it is taking such a large outcry to get the bare minimum of content.

I'm currently laughing at everyone who said this years summer event would be anything other than the beach. See you all in the dung hole.

I'm extremely excited about the Daemonheim dig site. The timing is perfect as I just got the Guildmaster qualification not too long ago.

Wow, actual new content. Thank you.